The Future of Investment Advice

In order to understand the future of investment advice I think it is essential to understand how the industry has developed to where it is today.

When I started in the financial services industry back in the 1970’s retail customers got advice about what to buy and sell from their stockbrokers. At the larger brokerage firms that usually meant that your broker would call you and tell that they or the firm’s research department had identified a stock that was a “buying opportunity”. This was often accompanied by a recommendation of what you should sell to pay for your new purchase so your broker would make not one, but two commissions from the recommendation.

When the stock market suddenly crashed in 1987 a lot of customers asked their stock broker why the broker had not seen the crash coming. The brokers really had no good answer. The crash took a lot of money out of the market and caused a lot of customers to lose faith in their broker’s ability to select investments for them.

Partially to placate those customers with something new and partially to make more money the industry introduced wrap accounts. A wrap account places the customer’s account into the hands of a professional money manager for an annual fee which is shared with the introducing stockbroker.

Wrap accounts introduced the idea that the individual brokers would be compensated on the customer assets under management (AUM) rather than the commissions that their accounts generated. This let the brokers do what they do best (sell) and let the professional money managers manage the accounts.

It also created a conflict of interest. Managers kept investors fully invested because that is what they had been hired to do. If the managers started to accumulate large cash positions in customers’ accounts, the customers might withdraw the cash. That would be counter-productive to the brokers who were being paid to bring in more and more new assets.

By the mid-1990s the market had recovered nicely and people started asking how long the boom would last. At the end of 1996 Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan attributed the sharp run up in stock prices to “irrational exuberance”. Neither the brokers nor the money managers advised the customers to sell when they had large profits and maintain a cash position

Much of the run-up in the 1990s was attributed to new tech companies that not everyone understood. Consequently, the firms hired highly qualified research analysts to parse through the various issues and recommend what they considered to be the best.

At the same time, the brokerage firms were making a lot of money by underwriting new issues of these tech stocks. In many cases the research analysts were working to support the efforts of the firms’ investment bankers. They only wrote reports describing why their firm’s banking client’s offerings were a “buying opportunity”.

That also created conflicts of interest. When the market finally crashed it was revealed that some analysts had never suggested that the price of any of the stocks they covered would not go higher. Some analysts never recommended a “sell” on any stock they followed even when fundamental analysis told them that they should be selling.

Again, when the market crashed in 2001 a lot of people asked their broker why they did not see the crash coming or take some defensive action to protect their profits. And again, the brokers did not have a good answer other than “no one can really predict the market” which, of course, is exactly the skill that the stockbrokers and money managers had been espousing to customers all along.

The brokers themselves got more than a little frustrated with the large wire houses and many jumped ship. Sometook their clients and set up shop as independent investment advisors.

The accounts were still housed at a brokerage firm that got paid a commission on each trade but the advisors now kept all of the annual account management fees. This was a better deal for the advisor even if they now needed to pay their own rent and overhead. The idea that no one can really predict the market suited these independent advisors well because they were more interested in acquiring new customers and assets than picking good investments.

That led to a concept that as long as a portfolio was diversified it really did not matter which stocks were in it. By diversifying the stock portion of the portfolio into different asset classes the advisors were trying to avoid what had happened in the tech wreck. The theory was that if you bought stocks in different asset classes, the collapse of one sector, like tech, would not hurt you too badly.

This did not help investors when the market crashed in 2008. This crash was caused by a bubble in real estate and foolish lending in the financial sector. Most companies are affected by what occurs with banks and real estate as both effect business and consumer spending. Diversification only mitigates certain risks. This crash involved a systemic risk, not an asset sector risk, a fact that many brokers never understood.

It should not surprise anyone that investors again asked their advisors why they did not get them out of the market before it crashed. Again the response was “no one can predict the market”.

Since 2008 the advisor industry has seen the rise of robo-advisors. These are popular with millennial investors who do not trust the Wall Street professionals after 2008. Robo-advisors select portfolios based upon algorithms. This makes as much sense as throwing darts at a list of stocks and bonds even if you are a champion dart thrower.

Robo-advisors are not even attempting to predict the market and they are not programmed to ever sell the portfolio if the market starts to crash, which we all know, it will. They are just selling diversification at a lower price. They achieve “diversification” by buying mutual funds or ETFs. These contain so many stocks that mathematically, there is no actual diversification.

Robo-advisors advertise that people pay too much for investment advice. I would argue that most customers pay too little. My current advisor spends countless hours poring over financial statements and research reports to pick individual stocks. He gets the same 1% of AUM as advisors who put all of their clients into pre-selected diversified portfolios of various funds and ETFs without really knowing a lot about them or how they might be expected to perform. With investment advice, like everything else in life, the rule should be that you get what you pay for.

What I think may be an intelligent alternative going forward is for people to just put their investment advisor on a fixed monthly or yearly retainer. It would cost more for a larger portfolio than a smaller one because all portfolios need to be constantly monitored and larger portfolios require more time. Advisors would keep their customers and get referrals by keeping their customers happy.

And what makes customers happy? They want to have more money in their accounts at the end of the year than they had at the beginning of the year. That is true even if the market crashes because there is nothing more foolish than staying in the market when the market is going down.

The customers will never truly be happy and get the results they truly want until advisors thoroughly analyze and review the stocks they recommend and purchase and hold only those that they believe are likely to appreciate. They will never get there if advisors refuse to take profits and move to cash when the market indicates that they should. They will never get there if advisors diversify to mitigate some risks, but not all.

People actually do predict the future performance of individual stocks and the market in general. I doubt that you would be surprised if I told you that the ones who do it well get paid a lot of money by investment banks, mutual funds and large institutions.

The advisor industry needs to understand that parroting the phrase “no one can predict the market” every time the market corrects is the fastest way to be demonstrate that you do not know what you are doing. Providing beneficial investment advice takes time and effort. Advisors are entitled to be paid for their efforts. But first they have to actually do the work and that work is accurately predicting the future price of individual securities and the market in general.